[Subsection]

Myyriäinen had wandered through many parishes and sat on many benches, worn shiny with use, in old-fashioned   [p. 28]   cottages that swarmed with children, when circumstances decreed that he should make the acquaintance of his prospective friend and benefactor, Iivana Lampinen, the tinker from our village. The one who stopped him at the right moment was an ill-tempered old man with a white beard, who early one morning in June sat by the wayside talking to himself. He looked like a prophet from the Old Testament, and Myyriäinen could not keep from going up and saying hello to him. When the old man discovered that he had a listener, he immediately exploded into passionate curses; trembling, he waved his clenched fists in the air and called down calamity onto the heads of his own children. They had driven their father out of house and home, may every ill descend upon them, may God strike them with pestilences and evil eyes! A peculiar and primitive magnificence lay upon the old man's gestures, and his speech had a strength and a fire which could have befitted King Lear. Myyriäinen listened fascinated to his confused litany. He reflected that revenge must be the mightiest of the spirits of the earth; what a triumph it celebrated over the old man's fragility, his actual impotence!

He had hardly brought his thought to an end before his attention was captured by a curious cortege which came along the road at a sharp trot. He got a confused impression of some strange black figures and pale flowing manes, and almost immediately found himself in the midst of an indescribable chaos. Not until afterwards was he able to figure out that the lead horse had shied away from his prophet, who stood with his hands raised in malediction; the cart had turned over and its passengers had landed in the ditch. The first detail which he clearly perceived was a tall, crepe-hung, black hat which lay badly battered in the ditch. He stared at it for a long time, as if he thought it unnatural that such an item had suddenly appeared among the nettles and   [p. 29]   the coltsfoot in a ditch beside a Finnish highway. Slowly he realized that he was looking at the head-covering of an Orthodox priest-monk.

The monks and the peasants from all of the four carts stood together in a flock, staring as though frozen at a monk who lay on the edge of the ditch in a twisted position, his face turned upward. A peaceful composure which resembled that of death lay spread over his pale countenance. Myyriäinen could not take his eyes away from it. He felt someone touch him, but in order not to lose the expression in the monk's face, he did not turn around to see who it was. He merely heard the knowing voice which said: "Very likely the monk is dead now."

To his astonishment he saw the angry prophet press his way past the others and throw himself down on the ground. "Mercy, father, mercy! Have pity on a poor sinner," he cried with the same passionate voice in which he had recently hurled his curses. He wept aloud in awareness of his guilt, and Myyriäinen marveled in his heart at these tears which came rushing forth from a ground as hard as stone. The company grew mightily excited; everyone shouted at the same time, pointing at the poor old man who had been the cause of the accident. A red-faced peasant was just about to kick him out of the way with his boot-clad foot when the supposed dead man arose, as much unharmed as if he had rested on the wings of angels. He gazed at the confused faces around him and reproached himself for not having been able to lift these others, by his ardor's hidden might, to the region of peace where he himself had tarried. When the accident occurred, he had closed his eyes, collected his spirit, and descended into the measureless depths of prayer's serenity. He had lain unmoving, just as he had been cast to the ground, until a prayer for pity had reached his distant ear. "Go in peace, my son. Your sin is not greater   [p. 30]   than mine, and Our Savior lives," he said with the oddly veiled and yet shining voice of him who returns. The impression of these simple words, ringing through dark discords with the pure and silver note of spiritual deliberation, was so strong that all the people present, the monks as well as the peasants, fell as one man to their knees, bowing to the earth before an invisible majesty.

Abel Myyriäinen was the only person present who did not fall to his knees on this occasion; someone who has Lutheran obstinacy in his blood and has been trained to be insensitive toward symbolic actions cannot do such things. But the event made a strong impression upon him. He had received an insight into the relation of the Orthodox church to the people, and he was astonished at how easily and unpretentiously the transcendental joined itself to the natural and the prosaic. He gazed fixedly at the monk's white face with the shining eyes and the jet-black, well-tended beard which gave the countenance a stern and ascetic air. He did not know who stood before him, but the secret reverence he felt told him that he had entered into contact with a spiritual force to which he had never paid heed before.

Later he would find out that it was Father Isaakij he had met, the priest-monk from the secluded little cloister on the lonely island, a man known in the whole of the Orthodox world as one of the great heroes of "unceasing prayer." His seemingly unimportant cloister, consecrated to the memory of the birth of the Mother of God, for centuries had been a citadel of prayer and intercession, from which beams of quiet light had gone out to the people of these marches, devastated by unrest and war.